Kryten

But this is SpaceX, the company those very same internet people say is the paragon of the free market in all it's glory. Surely they don't require government funding? (In all seriousness most of their income is likely to be from commercial GTO launches soon anyway. If they mean what they say, this really isn't a big issue.)

SpaceX are a company that launches rockets, not the bloody second coming. Quite a few people on the internet seem to have difficulty making that distinction.

Roscosmos are confident they've found the cause of the previous Progress failure, next flight is planned for 3rd July.

Cargo Dragon has no abort system. More likely to have been the FTS charges, which are designed to do exactly this.

SpaceX visual quality seems to be getting much worse as traffic rises, so I'd stick with NASATV.

Alternative SpaceX webcast link here. More likely to conk out as traffic rises, but doesn't have the awful compression of the youtube version.

Now with actual coverage.

The is up, but not providing actual coverage yet.

About half an hour to launch, NASA TV coverage is already live.

Space tourism and commercial research. It's arguable whether either are big enough to truly support an industry, but Space Adventures and reservations with Bigelow show demand for both at least exist.

CCDev makes some sense because crewed LEO flights have potential non-government applications. BLEO simply doesn't.

NASA is just the prime integrator, the contractors are ultimately producing entire stages.

There are no caps of any kind at the Arctic (unless you count the Greenland one, which again is shrinking), it's just an area of transient, constantly shifting sea ice. You can cross the whole thing in an icebreaker.

The actual cap is shrinking, we've got plenty of radar data showing that. Sea ice coverage at the antarctic is expanding slightly, probably due to increased calving from the land.

Here's an article on one of the more interesting bits of internal cargo on this mission; prototype AR smartglasses.

J2-X is not planned for use on SLS either. The EDS design was replaced by an RL-10-powered version called EUS.

Very. Edit: wait, what? Has the 10 character limit been removed?

Harder to do, but you can good a good picture of surface and atmospheric temps from low orbits through sufficiently sensitive IR spectrometry; see for example the AIRS instrument on Aqua.

It doesn't have to, it can measure solar influx directly (being, y'know, in space). Obviously emissivity and reflectivity will render this pretty useless for predicting e.g. temperature at a local level, but gives a nice whole-globe model of radiative forcing.

Eumetsat, among others can directly measure solar influx and reflected radiation, rendering direct temperature results pretty much irrelevant.

It honestly makes me sad that somebody on a forum about space exploration thinks we get all our climate information from ground-based thermocouples.

Similarly to water, you can't have liquid nitrogen at very low pressures, only solid and gas.

That was the full Energia, which flew. Energia-M was a post-soviet attempt to preserve the technology by producing a Proton replacement, which would have potential for commercial use. Presumably it's been mocked up for some ISS delivery mission.

Again, this would only make sense in the past. We know there's net warming now, we've measured it.

That'd probably be for the best, and what's going to happen anyway when the lease ends. There's no way these facilities will be used given the shifts to Plesetsk and Vostochny.